Astute readers of this blog (those who are left) have noticed a long hiatus in posts. This has been due to medical reasons, and also because of these, most future posts for awhile will be cancer-themed. Perhaps research summarized here may help others also looking for information to help them with difficult decisions about their treatment.

But today is a biotune day. I am a huge Stephen Sondheim fan, and spent the last couple nights watching separately the first and second acts of one of his best, "Into the Woods." As a kid I worked through all the fairy tale books in our elementary school library at about the same time that other girls were working their way through all the horse books. I enjoy not only the traditional originals, but creatively reworked versions as well (which to be clear does not apply to much of anything out of Disney studios).

"Into the Woods" was constructed similarly to Sondheim's previous musical, also brilliant, called "Sunday in the Park with George." Its theme was the lonely isolationism of the driven artist, but the two acts creatively contrasted the difficulties of the art business a hundred years ago versus in modern times.

"Into the Woods" makes even more of a thematic leap between its two acts. The first act is an intertwining of several well known fairly tales into one interlocking story, in which the characters all interact with one another in clever new ways. It addresses the simple, traditional fairy tale theme of overcoming a difficult challenge (represented by having to go "into the woods"), after which the main characters live "happily ever after." Even in the brutal original versions of the Grimm tales, usually someone we are rooting for comes out on top in the end. At the end of Sondheim's first act, the convoluted plot leads us eventually to the familiar happy endings - Cinderella gets her prince, Rapunzel and her prince are reunited, Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are saved from the wolf, and Jack kills the giant by chopping down the beanstalk.

The second act, however, takes a right turn by introducing the idea that actually, there is no such thing as "happily ever after." In real life, there will continually be obstacles to overcome - and not only the relatively minor obstacles that pepper the tales in the first act, but major obstacles that force us to face intense suffering and grief head-on. After the wife of Jack's slain giant goes on a rampage, killing several of the characters, the culminating, haunting song, "No One is Alone," is sung by the remaining grown-ups to the children Red Riding Hood and Jack, to explain to them that despite the harsh realities of life, we can find a way to move on. It always made me a bit weepy from the first time I heard it twenty years ago, but it now takes on a new poignance as I head deep into the woods myself. (Here are the lyrics, with the caveat that lyrics without music are a poor substitute for the real thing.)

But the simple, final lyrics of the show are the most applicable for anyone hitting a bump in the road:

"Into the woods, then out of the woods, and home before dark."

Labels: forests, music

The announcement of two Science papers (Fargione et al., 2008; Searchinger et al., 2008) calculating higher carbon dioxide emissions through changes in land use is making a lot of noise. But will the public get this travesty enough to force a change in federal policy on ethanol?

It didn't take these studies to wake up scientists and more progressive policy makers to the dangers of overemphasis on ethanol.

Yet a quick check on Technorati of responses to this news shows a lot of people still don't get it. Some bloggers gleefully have blamed environmentalists for going to town on ethanol use, but scientists (the great majority of whom are environmentalists, but not vice versa) have known better for a long time - some smart ones just got a couple of easy Science papers out of the hot political potato that biofuels production is becoming. The papers are highly complementary, and both expose the faulty math that has been done to promote ethanol production as "renewable" energy - which is not so renewable after all when rain forests and grasslands are destroyed to produce it.

Fargione et al. calculated actual carbon release due to land clearing in order to create more land for biofuel production, and Searchinger et al. produced a model which uses estimates of these numbers. Both methods produce the same conclusion: the worldwide ethanol frenzy, ostensibly about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, will actually accelerate the production of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the destruction of ecosystems which have much higher carbon storage than the biofuels plants themselves do. This is not a problem of the future, but is currently happening, both directly and indirectly: either new land is cleared for biofuel production, or the conversion of current crop land (or animal-feed land) for biofuel forces creation of new crop land. The fallacy of this is most extreme in Indonesian peatlands, which Fargione et al. point out are huge carbon sinks, and thus liberating this carbon to grow palms for oil leaves us with a carbon debt that may not be repaid for over 800 years.

Searchinger et al.'s model, as all models do, must make numerous assumptions about the numbers that cannot necessarily be confirmed at this time. However, they take great pains to be conservative in their estimates of carbon released due to changing land use, and the logic in their introduction cannot be denied. They point out what is known from previous studies: the carbon cost of growing biofuel feedstocks, refining them into fuel, and then burning them, is no different from the carbon cost of oil. What supposedly swings the balance in favor of biofuels is that while they are growing they take up carbon from the atmosphere, while the burning of fossil fuels liberates previously sequestered carbon. Given that we know that land conversion means a lot less carbon sequestered in plants grown on the same acreage, the model is practically gratuitous.

So why the big push for "renewable" ethanol? It didn't come from environmentalists. It came from agribusiness, the huge corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, who have the most to gain from this legislation. By declaring the production of ethanol "renewable," (not to mention running their ads on PBS), they have framed themselves as a company who cares about people and the environment. But the consequences of the ethanol rush would have been obvious to anyone formulating the policy. Simply, like most legislation we've seen over the last decade plus, this is all about money - specifically, taxpayer giveaways to huge corporations whose buddies happen to be running the government.

Given that once again we seem to have failed to find our magic energy bullet, then what is the solution? Are scientists who criticize various alternative energy sources on environmental grounds hopelessly naive? Not at all. They simply acknowledge that our range of solutions is quite a bit wider than that proposed by corporate giants who want all the taxpayers eggs in their industry's personal basket.


References

Fargione, J.,Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., Hawthorne, P., 2008. Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt. Science (in press).

Searchinger, T, Heimlich, R., Houghton, R. A. , Dong, F., Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., Tokgoz, S., Hayes, D., Yu, T. 2008. Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change. Science (in press).

Labels: biodiversity, ecology, environment, forests, politics

The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae, Coleoptera: Scolytidae) is native to western North America. A finer resolution of its range, however, reveals that it is historically native to some parts of the West, but not others. Specifically, it has generally had a limited presence in Canada, primarily due to very low winter temperatures. Although the pine beetle's cold tolerance is incredibly high because they have the anti-freeze compound glycerol in their bodies, generally sustained (5 or more days) temperatures below -30F kill most of them off. This has reduced the likelihood of mountain pine beetle outbreaks in Alberta, and thus susceptible trees there have historically been protected, but are now exposed and being attacked (Rice et al., 2007).

In the last 5-10 years, however, conditions in the West, including Alberta, have changed. Rising temperatures have meant that for several winters in a row, the northern Rockies have not reached low enough temperatures to kill off the mountain pine beetles infesting the trees there. Even in the U.S., the historical trend was that every few years most of the beetles are killed due to cold, and thus the outbreaks were knocked back. So the pine beetles, which are a native species, have begun behaving like an invasive one: they are multiplying rapidly without a natural check, and expanding their range, attacking populations of trees that are not adapted to them.

Compounding this problem is the recent history of fire suppression in the West. One of mountain pine beetle's favorite hosts, lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) is a fire-adapted species; it is common for lodgepole stands left undisturbed to burn once or twice a century, and be replaced by seeds from serotinous cones (cones in which the seeds are sealed unless they reach the high temperatures of a fire). Lodgepole stands are striking in that usually all the trees are the same age and size due to the burn regimen. Mountain pine beetles prefer older, larger trees. The larger the tree, the more food available for the developing beetle larvae, and the larger the increase in population the next year, if there is not a sustained hard freeze. By suppressing natural fires in lodgepole habitat, we may have enhanced the long term outbreak we are seeing now.

But here's the flip side: mountain pine beetle outbreaks make lodgepole pine stands more susceptible to fire down the road (Page and Jenkins, 2007). For instance, the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fires were highly correlated spatially with trees affected by a mountain pine beetle outbreak about fifteen years before (Lynch et al., 2006). What we may be experiencing now is a mega-outbreak, due to warming and fire suppression, which will eventually contribute to massive forest fires throughout the West in the future (also increasing of course from drier weather), which may have the benefit of being a different kind of check on mountain pine beetle populations. But instead of the historical ecology, in which mountain pine beetle outbreaks occurred for maybe 3-4 years, decades apart, a whole new, different ecology driven by constant high beetle populations decimating the forest, which as a result may burn more often, will remake the landscape in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

Of course there are those who believe that we can replicate the ecological benefits of fire, while keeping the timber available for human use. However, thinning trees mechanically is a blunt instrument that does not mimic the effects of fire at all in the case of lodgepole (Sibold et al., 2007). In fact, there is the danger of unintentionally increasing the density of trees (and necessitating, further, constant thinning effort) if enough of the canopy is opened to encourage new seeds to germinate and grow. There are those who believe humans are all powerful and can easily control insect outbreaks and fires through management if only the wicked, meddling environmentalists would let them (never mind that somehow the forests managed themselves just fine for millennia). In fact, many species are adapted to respond to biotic (e.g. herbivory pressure) and abiotic (e.g. weather) influences in ways we don't even understand. Global climate change is now accepted by anyone rational to be at least partly enhanced by the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by industrial humans that would not have occurred otherwise. Fire suppression is an active (and expensive) choice that trades short-term convenience for long-term ecological disruption, whose consequences we are barely beginning to understand. Those who blame "environmentalists" for the hundreds of acres of brown pines they see spreading like a cancer in the West, would find that ecologists (pretty much environmentalists by default) only wish they had such god-like power to affect the ecology of our forests, so they could save them from 150 years of disastrous "management."


References

Lynch, H.J., Renkin, R.A., Crabtree, R.L. & Moorcroft, P.R. (2006) The influence of previous mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) activity on the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Ecosystems, 9:1318-1327.

Ono, H. (2003) Mountain Pine Beetle Symposium: Challenges and Solutions. Kelowna, British Columbia. T.L. Shore, J.E. Brooks, and J.E. Stone (editors). Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Information Report BC-X-399, Victoria, BC. 298 p.

Page, W.G. & Jenkins, M.J. (2007) Mountain pine beetle-induced changes to selected lodgepole pine fuel complexes within the intermountain region. Forest Science, 53:507-518.

Rice, A.V., Thormann, M.N. & Langor, D.W. (2007) Mountain pine beetle associated blue-stain fungi cause lesions on jack pine, lodgepole pine, and lodgepole x jack pine hybrids in Alberta. Canadian Journal of Botany-Revue Canadienne de Botanique, 85:307-315.

Sibold, J.S., Veblen, T.T., Chipko, K., Lawson, L., Mathis, E. & Scott, J. (2007) Influences of secondary disturbances on lodgepole pine stand development in rocky mountain national park. Ecological Applications, 17:1638-1655.


Thanks to T. Etienne for initial information on mountain pine beetle

Labels: ecology, environment, forests, insects, invasive species

Our local wilderness controversy has made national news. The article is suggestive of the growing recognition that land use is a complex problem because of the large diversity of stakeholders, but only scratches the surface of the problem.

The current backlash in Beaverhead County, Montana, is against a consortium of environmental groups (including the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association) and logging companies (including RY Timber and Sun Mountain Lumber) who recognize the need for some sort of compromise among those with widely divergent interests in public land. The group is presenting to the Forest Service a plan that exchanges more guaranteed logging in certain forest areas in southwest Montana for more acreage in the forest being designated as wilderness. The plan has the advantages of providing for stable timber harvests that are minimally invasive but will allow logging companies to keep operating, while it recognizes the value of preserving land in wilderness areas to maintain the watershed and prevent overexploitation of resources.

Unfortunately, in this county, "wilderness" and "environment" are the dirtiest words you can say. To put it in perspective, voters in Beaverhead County overwhelmingly supported a 2004 initiative (put on the ballot by an out-of-state mining company) to repeal a ban on cyanide leach mining, which has damaged many an ecosystem and watershed in several states. While the rest of the state was smart enough to understand that no number of local mining jobs is enough to offset the cost of a destroyed fishery, Beaverhead County, whose nearly entire economy is dependent on tourism on its blue-ribbon trout streams and ranching (which also requires clean river water), supported the initiative, apparently seeing the issue only as a vote against the evil environmentalists.

A deluge of letters to the editor is now condemning the proposed logging-environmental draft forest plan simply because it creates a few more thousand acres of wilderness, a small percentage within a sea of exploited forest. The letter writers take the common view that the creation of wilderness somehow takes land away from their use, because they prefer to use ATVs rather than their own two feet (or horses) for their recreation on public land. What has been lacking in every letter by an ATV user so far has been any acknowledgement that some ATVers themselves fuel anti-vehicle backlash when they ride off road illegally, trashing out areas that are no longer available for the enjoyment of others. They also do not acknowledge that hiking and skiing, being quite, no-emissions activities, do not impinge on anyone else's enjoyment of the forest, while the use of ATVs and snowmobiles very much degrades the forest experience of non-users. It is ironic that they claim that the use of the forest is being stolen from them by the addition of a few more acres where they are not allowed, when they have already stolen peace and fresh air from the rest of us in the great majority of the national forest.

They call for "management" of the forest because it is a "waste" to let nature take its course in the form of fires and insect outbreaks - and apparently they are ignorant that the potential new law as drafted allows for management of fire and insects in wilderness areas when deemed necessary, and the grandfathering of grazing rights. In the mythical world of the wilderness opponent, nature can be completely controlled and managed, and any failure to do so by the forest service is blamed on "environmentalists" (who apparently have god-like powers possessed by no one else).

The logging-environmental consortium came together to reach a compromise because all the organizations realize that current management policies are unsustainable. They have drafted a perfectly reasonable proposal that keeps logging alive in Montana, but supports both economic and ecological sustainability, unaddressed in past policies which subsidized logging companies to clear cut huge swaths of land, without remediation. The Forest Service is under no obligation to support the new plan, but would be well advised to do so. Those of us lucky to live in a county that consists mainly of public land would do well to remember that the land is not a personal playground to exploit here and now, but belongs to every single U.S. taxpayer, living and unborn, from sea to shining sea.

Labels: ecology, environment, forests